It was called The Market Café, although the cattle market it had once served had moved, twenty years before, to a location outside the city. A bus station had been built where they had once auctioned heifers and swine, and the customers of the Market Café now were mostly bus drivers and their forlorn passengers. Arnold and Vera looked out of place. Vera had dressed differently, as though she was in disguise, reverting to a charity-shop student-chic that would have been her normal garb in the days when there was still a cattle market over the road. She had on a woolly, rainbow-coloured beret, and wellingtons, for no reason that Arnold could think of. She drew very little attention from the men in the cafe, yet Arnold couldn’t think why they weren’t staring at her.
To his amazement she ordered a mixed grill. He had thought she was vegetarian, but then realized he had no reason to think this, other than it would have suited her.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said, as if reading his thoughts. She removed her beret and let golden strands fall beautifully about her face. It seemed strange, but he felt he had her much more in his possession now than when she was naked beneath him in her and her husband’s double bed. Here, though clothed, she was before him and for him in her entirety, sitting across the table from him, a miniature Manhattan of condiments between them, and the laminated menu from which they’d ordered.
He wanted to take stock of her beauty. In their relationship so far, in its rush of emotions, in its hastiness and secrecy, he hadn’t been able to take his time to appreciate what she was. Her face was little, trim and perfectly balanced. It bore so few signs of ageing, and yet she was unmistakably a woman of her years. For the first time he saw traces of otherness in her, of a different line of descent, the Slavic, eastern races noticeable in her eyes and cheekbones. He kept forgetting she had a Russian mother and father, or was it grandparents? In her voice there was nothing more pinpointable than southern English. He felt he knew nothing about her.
At the same time, no matter how much he appreciated her physical presence, he was bothered by the feeling that this wasn’t all of her. That the whole of her was something beyond her flesh and blood, rainbow-wool-and-wellington-booted-here-and-nowness. He thought something as ungraspable as mist was a part of her, that could detach itself and drift away.
When the food came, he was horrified by her serving. Bacon, sausages, a chop, black pudding, kidneys. So much muscle on the plate, her meal looked more likely to eat her than the other way round. It pained him to imagine all that protein attacking her body, when she seemed made of purer things.
‘What’s the point of coming to a place like this if you can’t have the full eating experience?’ she said.
Arnold was disappointed.
‘I didn’t think we chose this place because of its food.’
Vera looked slightly less attractive when eating. Her face lost its symmetry, and she kept having to extract unchewable things from her mouth. She kept blowing her nose, an action that gave her hamster cheeks and eyes. He had given up an afternoon of sex with her for this.
He had not ordered any food, wrong-footed into believing that Vera wouldn’t be hungry, and he didn’t want to be the only one eating. By the time she ordered he’d already committed himself to having nothing, just a mug of tea. And now he was hungry. He didn’t believe she would finish it. All that grease and tissue going into that slight, pure body must surely cause some sort of chemical insurgency.
‘You are eating like someone who’s been held hostage.’
Vera said nothing but went on sawing away at the meat, placing it delicately in her mouth, then chewing, with difficulty. She seemed to be forcing it down, the long neck rippling with each swallow. She offered him a piece of offal on the end of her fork. He politely refused. She smiled at him.
‘Why won’t you eat anything?’
‘I’m not hungry. And like I said, I didn’t think we came here to eat.’
‘No. But then you’re not doing anything else, at the moment.’
‘I am doing something.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Looking at you.’
‘Looking at me stuffing my face.’
‘I like looking at you.’
Vera smiled again, but didn’t return the compliment. She seemed to be taking little notice of him.
‘So what did you want us to talk about?’ she said.
‘I just wanted us to know a little more about each other.’
‘In my limited experience, the more people know about each other, the more complicated everything gets. But go on.’
‘For instance – where were you born?’
‘Siberia. A little town called Bratsk. A few buildings and a hydro-electric dam. That’s all there is.’
‘You came to this country as a child?’
‘A teenager.’
‘Your English is wonderful.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Why did your family come here?’
‘My father was a scientist. He had wanted to defect to the West for years. He was always in trouble with the authorities. That’s why we ended up in Bratsk. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, he came here. Brought us all with him. He’s dead now.’
‘Did you have a happy childhood?’
Vera leaned back and sighed heavily. ‘This isn’t a conversation, it’s an interrogation.’
‘OK, I’m sorry. It’s just that you have a really interesting background. And you never talk about it.’
‘Backgrounds are complicated, like I said.’
‘Mine isn’t . . .’
She didn’t pick up the cue to ask him about his, and they were silent for a while. Arnold looked out of the window at the double-deckers nudging into the parking bays, the exhausted-looking passengers lining up at their doors. He watched as ten, fifteen, twenty or more people disappeared into the gaping mouth of the bus. Then marvelled at how they seemed to filter themselves, some going upstairs, others remaining on the lower deck.
‘Vera, I must ask you – does it trouble you that I am a heathen?’
Her answer shocked him.
‘Yes, a little bit.’
He didn’t know what to say. He had been expecting the opposite response. Then she said, ‘Though that is an interesting word you use to describe yourself. The heathens had their gods.’
‘I was trying to be funny. I’m an atheist really. Is that worse?’
‘Yes, because there’s no hope for you.’
He laughed. There was the faintest sparkle of irony in her voice. He wasn’t sure that she was serious.
‘You know I will never believe in God, for as long as I live?’
‘I wonder how you can know that.’
‘All I’m saying is – if you are thinking of asking me to come along to your church . . .’
‘I wouldn’t do that.’
She looked troubled, and turned her face downwards towards her empty plate. She had finished her food, all that was left on the plate was the chop bone, curled like a bass clef, picked clean.
He wondered if he’d offended her.
‘It must be difficult for you, with what’s happening between us. All I’ve done is been a bastard, but you’ve sinned.’
He felt a little more confident now that he could say things like this. After a long silence she said, ‘I suppose I have faith in Him that there is a purpose to all of this.’
‘Surely your Church regards marriage as sacred.’
‘I don’t know, Arnold. The Christian God is a God of love. Perhaps it is love that is the sacred thing.’
He thought that was a beautiful thing to say, and stayed quiet, so the words would hang in the air for as long as possible. Then, after another long silence, and very quietly, ‘Yes, perhaps it is.’
Before they could meet again, the sewing evening intervened. Arnold would normally have done his vanishing act even before the women arrived, but this week he decided to remain as a presence. He hung around as the women entered and chatted, as the bowls of olives and nuts were put out and the drinks distributed. He sat at the dining table while the women filled the lounge, unfolding their stitched fabrics, showing them to each other. One woman was making bridesmaids’ dresses for a friend’s daughter’s wedding. Peach silk with puffed shoulders and a square neckline. Another was making a set of dungarees profligate with pockets. Arnold intruded on a conversation with praise for someone’s needlework. The comments were taken in good, if puzzled spirit by the needleworker, though he sensed he was testing the patience of this group by lingering as he did. It slowly became evident that Vera wasn’t attending this evening.
‘Isn’t it time for you to retire discreetly?’ asked the woman with the highlighted hair, who always seemed to resent Arnold’s presence more strongly than the others.
He wanted to ask where Vera was but remained silent. He looked at the group now, in the absence of Vera, and it seemed a tawdry thing, a coven of seamstresses, fiddling with hooks and catches. A fussy little posse of haberdashers unpicking and plucking at things. They bared their teeth to break a line of button thread or to loosen an overtightened stitch. He suddenly felt an urge to bear down on this little gathering as though it was an illegal sit-in or protest, to shake a can of pepper spray and let them have it full in their painted faces, spray it so hard their hair flew. He wanted to march through them and trample their delicate lacework, wield a batten and crack some skulls, rip their frocks. Make them get the hell out of his house. Shocked by the violence of his vision, and the sense of delight in it that he tried to fight back, he left the room unnoticed, and went to his study, not bothering to listen in.